I was sure I'd missed it. You know, the "fall back" part of the "spring forward, fall back" time changing that we do every year. I was sure it got by me somehow.
As we moved through the month of October, I kept looking for the little clock on the front page of my newspaper that reminds us that this is the weekend to turn the clocks back, but I never saw it.
Turns out, we don't do it in October anymore. We do it during the first weekend in November, so yesterday was the big day. We did it in November last year, too, but it apparently didn't leave much of an impression on me because I spent all of last month waiting for that extra hour of sleep.
The delay in the time change is the result of a law passed by Congress, the Energy Policy Act, which extended daylight saving time by about a month, beginning it earlier in the spring and ending it later in the fall in order to save energy. Congress had time for that kind of tinkering in the days before the economy collapsed.
According to author Michael Downing, who wrote Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, the law was changed, in part, to please the candy industry, which was hoping the extra hour of daylight on Halloween night would increase trick-or-treating and therefore candy sales.
Candy industry spokespeople dispute this, The New York Times reported, saying that the real motivation was child safety - they didn't want children walking the streets in the dark any more than necessary.
Anyway, I was not the only one who was confused by the time change. There are a lot of computers and appliances out there and not a few cell phones that still think we make the change on the last weekend in October.
Fixing this mini Y2K problem has cost millions, not to mention the confusion that resulted last month when clocks on microwaves were telling mothers all over America the wrong time and making the kids late for school.
People were not, however, having as many heart attacks, which is surprising when you consider the stress of not knowing for sure what time it is.
Swedish researchers looked at 20 years of records and discovered that the number of heart attacks drops on the Monday after clocks are set back an hour, according to news reports last week.
They concluded that it is probably because we get that extra hour of sleep, but I am suspicious. It might be because all those heart-attack-prone, Type A personalities could relax because they had an extra hour to get everything done.
